Omnichannel commerce firm PowaTag has unveiled a new feature for its mobile commerce app that enables consumers to buy through social media in seconds with a single tap on their smartphone.

The PowaTag app uses a variety of triggers including watermarks hidden in broadcast audio and scanned tags on products or billboards, and uses pre-entered payment and address information to finalise sales in under five seconds.

The latest integration enables brands and retailers to offer direct sales to users of popular social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Marketers can use posts and images to embed URLs that will activate PowaTag, with items already set for purchase. Users who do not have PowaTag will instead be brought to an app download page, before completing the sale.

With social media accounting for nine per cent of all marketing spending, and set to increase to 21 per cent within the next five years, companies still struggle to quantify what impact social media has on their business and sales. The new PowaTag feature offers a much more direct channel to immediate conversion.

“When you consider that the average person in the UK now spends 12 per cent of their time on social networking, the potential as a retail channel is simply astounding,” said Dan Wagner, CEO and chairman of Powa Technologies. “But despite almost every retailer on the planet investing more money into social media, the truth is that the measurable direct return is still shockingly small.

“The introduction of PowaTag will finally allow retailers to seize the enormous opportunity of social commerce and enable them to achieve real, measurable sales from their social media presence, bringing their products directly to customers with the tap of smartphone.”